The Near Floors

A man is afraid of dogs and cannot say why. Ask him, and he will tell you nothing ever happened. Something did. A large dog knocked him flat when he was two years old. He cried for an hour, and the mind let go of it long ago. The body did not.

Or a smell comes through a kitchen door, onions and cumin in hot oil, and a grown woman is five years old again, sitting on a counter in her grandmother's house in the village. She has not thought of that kitchen in thirty years. The smell brings it back whole before she has time to think.

Both examples belong to the upper floors, the four that are our own. The deep floors were given to everyone alike. The upper floors are filled by a single life, and our own experience and our own will have a hand in them. Together they make individual karma.

These four are easy to blur, because a single moment can leave something on all of them at once. So it helps to hold each one to its own question.

Sensory memory answers the question: what came in? It is the record of what the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin have received. The smell of cumin in hot oil. A voice. The cold of a stone floor. Sensory memory is about intake. You did nothing to make it except be there. It is fast and vivid, and it can carry you across thirty years in a moment, as the kitchen smell did.

Articulate memory answers the question: what can I call up and say? It is everything you know that you know. A phone number. The capital of Canada. The name of the village where your grandmother lived. The steps of her recipe. If you can reach it on purpose and put it into words, it is articulate. It is most of what schools work with.

Inarticulate memory answers the question: what moves me that I cannot reach? It is what is stored below the reach of thought. You cannot call it up. You cannot put it into words. Often you do not know it is there. Yet it acts on you. The man afraid of dogs is its plainest example. The event went in through his senses, but he cannot remember it and he cannot explain the fear. What makes a memory inarticulate is not what it is about. It is that it is out of reach.

Karmic memory answers the question: what have I made of myself by my own doing? It is the stored mark of our own willed actions, repeated until they have become tendencies. The hand that reaches for the phone the moment there is nothing to do. The temper that flares when we are corrected. The kindness that comes without effort because it has been practised for years. Karmic memory is not what happened to us. It is what we did, and did again, and what that doing has made of us. It shows itself as a lean, a pull, a readiness to act one way rather than another.

The line between karmic and inarticulate memory is the one most easily lost, so it is worth drawing twice. Inarticulate memory is known by where a thing is kept: below the reach of words. Karmic memory is known by how a thing was made: by our own will. The two often overlap. Many of our deepest habits are both, made by our own doing and long since sunk out of sight. But they are not the same. The man afraid of dogs carries an inarticulate memory he did not make. A dog made it, when he was two. If he crosses the street every time a dog appears, for forty years, that repeated choosing becomes karmic memory as well. The first was done to him. The second he is doing.

In short:

• Sensory memory: what came in through the senses. It asks nothing of the will.
• Articulate memory: what you can call up on purpose and put into words.
• Inarticulate memory: what acts on you from below the reach of thought and words.
• Karmic memory: what your own repeated doing has made of you, felt as a pull to act.

This is why the upper floors matter so much. Much of what we call choosing rises from them. A man says, I have decided I do not trust her. Often the deciding was done long ago, by a tendency he built or a wound he cannot remember, and it has only now floated up. It feels like a choice. It is a memory.

Guru Amar Das wrote about memory that has soaked all the way in.

Guru Amar Das, salok in Sorath Ki Vaar, Ang 651

An oily rag can be scrubbed all day. It grows wetter, but no cleaner, because the oil is not on the cloth. It is in it.

That is a hard picture, and it would be a hard teaching if it ended there. It does not end there.

Ang 651

The rag cannot be scrubbed clean. It can be made new. The way is not more scrubbing. The way is grace, and the old self letting go.